35

GUILTILY, DARIUS SKIPPED a visit to Oliver the day after the de-warming party. He’d woken in the powder blue dawn and, needing more sleep, polished off the remainders of several bottles of wine standing amid a scatter of cigarette butts and withered radishes and slumping cheese. Next time he woke, he felt vaguely ill and decided to stay in. The following day, at about eleven, he made it to the Cedar Street apartment bearing a cheap set of sheets he’d picked up at a dollar store along the way. The spiked bolt remained spiked, unlocked. The hall outside the apartment smelled of distant poison, which, as soon as the door opened, resolved into inflammatory fumes of bleach. He always recognized that smell from the basement laundry room growing up. Something was off about the stillness in the apartment.

Darius dropped the flimsy plastic bag containing the sheet set and left the door ajar. He walked into the apartment with a ticklish spine. His knees felt a little spongy.

Oliver’s bed was unmade and empty. The old suitcase was on its side, open and also empty. Its boulder of red glass was on the floor along with the old beading tray and several strange wafers and pearls of dusty mercury. The mercury quivered against the floorboards when he walked over to see what it was. The papers and letters from the suitcase were all missing, along with the many notebooks of l’s and e’s. Oliver had brought his demented work on the notebooks to a close quite a long time ago, when he’d somehow been able to achieve a more perfect monotony. This appeared saner at least. But he’d carefully preserved the old notebooks.

Darius called his father’s name as sternly as he could. He heard a pretty, startled tinkling of liquid from the bathroom. It sounded like the showerhead had dribbled, or someone soaking in the bathtub had lifted an arm.

Giving the door a wide berth, Darius came around to look into the original owner’s slapdash attempt at a super-sexy bathroom. Brown sedimentary stains caked the aged basins of a black tub and sink.

On a tingling wave of nerves the inevitable fantasies came to Darius—discovering a body in there, someone cut into pieces, someone hiding and liable to spring out. The dizzying stench of bleach intensified the closer he came.

Oliver couldn’t really kneel anymore. His chest and arms rested awkwardly over the edge of the bathtub, while the lower half of his body was propped against the closed toilet. He looked almost like he’d fallen partway into the gap between toilet and tub, but he was full of desperate energy. Evidently in a hurry since hearing his name called, he clawed fistfuls of papers from the tile floor with both hands and plunged them into the bathtub. The splashing was violent. The old man kept forcing the papers to the bottom of the tub. He’d pushed back the sleeves of his filthy dressing gown. The sleeves were soaked black to his shoulders, and the silk stuck to his meatless biceps. His forearms were burned bright red from the bleach. Oliver turned his face away from the fumes and splashes as best he could, but his chest and his crumpled lips were already wet. He tried to dry his cheek with a wet shoulder of the dressing gown.

When Darius could finally speak, his question sounded bizarrely ordinary. “What’s up, Dad? Can I help?” His heart raced. His sense of responsibility skated toward panic.

Oliver squinted open an eye, a crazed look on his face. Darius could now see his father’s cheeks and chin were also inflamed. Red spilled-liquid shapes marked the pallor. His arms rose from the tub trailing water. He felt around his hip for an empty plastic bleach bottle, which he threw through the door at Darius. Taking the last of the papers in his fists, he submerged them. He kneaded the documents against the deglazed bottom of the tub. Blue-green-black water sloshed drunkenly from side to side and onto the bathroom floor, and the smell of bleach came out in waves. Oliver worked the wet paper like a laundress. All that remained on the bathroom floor was a heap of stretched spiral wires, the confetti of torn perforations and the odd scrap of a glossy travel brochure.

“OK!” Darius called. He wanted to sound stentorian, to shock Oliver into attention. He strode into the bathroom. He stood over his father in uncertainty. His sinuses burned and ran with thin mucus, so he tried breathing the poison through his mouth. Oliver’s arms kept moving in the tub with the same washerwoman stirring and kneading. Darius took hold of his father’s frail upper arm, which kept moving like a tie rod. Oliver shook the hand off again and again. In what looked like a pantomime of drunkenness Darius started missing his father’s arm with his slow-moving hand, or his father easily jerked his arm free from the gentle grasp. When Darius held on at last, a ridiculous yanking back and forth started.

After several grunting attempts, Darius got a purchase under both his father’s arms and began pulling him to his feet. Oliver screamed. The scream was feeble, a high-pitched, loudly spoken, Aaaahhhh, Aaaahhhh! Oliver repeated it like a siren. He interrupted himself only to move on to a nasal keening, a sound of pain or physical effort. He struggled as Darius walked him out of the bathroom toward his bed, across the puddled mercury which divided and scattered and glinted as they shuffled through it.

Darius found his father’s gaunt body surprisingly heavy. At least his struggling was feeble. He heaved Oliver like a sack the last two feet to sit him on the bed. Oliver kept screaming.

Where his own hands had gotten damp and where he’d rubbed under his nose, Darius could already feel his skin burning. His few patches of redness were nothing compared to Oliver, who looked as entirely red now. Head bowed, a haggard, waifish figure, Oliver sat on the edge of the bed and screamed, stinking of bleach.

Oddly, Darius wasn’t overly worried at first. He let Oliver scream the repetitive mezzo-forte scream but felt certain he had plenty of time. His real anxiety was historical. All those letters. He went back to check on the papers in the bathtub.

Most were already ruined. The ink of the old letters had become weird blotches and swirls on ghostly sheets suspended in the electric-colored water. The sheets moved like sea grass under the still wobbling surface, mercuric flashes slowing. Anything that still showed lettering, Darius gingerly pulled from the water. He held his breath to keep the fumes out. His fingers burned. He ran intact sheets out to the loft and lay them on the floor. The bleach made his hands feel hot to the core and raw and, somehow, mealy when he dried them on his thighs.

After several trips in and out of the bathroom, he noticed the writing on the pages he’d laid out on the floor continued to vanish. Likewise for pages he’d draped over the shower curtain rod or the lip of the sink. He’d have to rinse the bleach out of the soaked pages. He opened the faucet.

He transferred wet sheet after sheet into the basin of pure water. Like a photographer working against the arrow of time, his lines and shadows kept disappearing in his bath of fixer. Many of the papers tore. Many collapsed into a wet hank of whiteness. The work was futile, really, but Darius became absorbed in it. His race against time so played on his nerves that when an empty truck passed outside with the usual clangor of pothole and steel, he jumped violently, ruining the damp pages from one of Oliver’s scribbled journals. He drained the tub of its poisonous liquid. When the gulping stopped, all that was left was a mass of pulp from which Darius could no longer separate single pages. He filled the tub with clean water in a last effort to save something, but the force of the running water made a mess of what was left. Fragments of paper swirled like vortices of leaking egg white in boiling water. The handful of letters he’d been able to rescue, keep intact and lay flat outside the bathroom to dry, were now blank.

All this time, Oliver screamed. Darius barely registered the screams or the voices rising, he thought, from around the big pothole outside. On one relay, he looked over at Oliver, noticing instantly that the screaming wasn’t petulant eccentricity but real pain, agony even. Without a break in his desperate pace, Darius changed jobs. Now he bunched hand towels in the sink basin, destroying the last of the paper floating in it. He ferried the soaking towels to Oliver, runs that sent whips and drips of water and mercury flying everywhere. He tried to wash Oliver’s hands and forearms. Any rubbing against the bright red skin, however, any pressure at all, increased the volume of the screams. The noise rose and fell, nearly mechanically, as Darius manipulated the towels as gently as he could. He wrung them over Oliver’s lap and head, trying to rinse him in spiraling gouts of water.

After several trips, Darius came out of the bathroom to find other people were inside the apartment. One must have kicked his plastic bag of sheets from the door into the room. Imprinted with a pinkish I Heart New York heart, it sat near Oliver’s empty suitcase, deflated and wrinkly. These were the voices Darius had thought were coming from outside. One stranger, a neighbor probably, knelt by Oliver. Another was just hurrying back into the hall. The door had been propped open. The super hovered outside. Darius handed a towel to the kneeling neighbor without thinking, and she suggested, too calmly given the noise Oliver was making, “Why don’t you fill a big pot with water. Like a spaghetti pot. This was bleach, I guess? Did he fall?” In a few places, blisters were already forming on his father’s skin. Oliver’s mild screaming ceased completely when his first heart attack started. His eyes squeezed shut and opened in shock. The color of his cheeks deepened. His chest spasmed with silent gasping. His body didn’t appear physically capable of what looked like wracking motor seizures. Nor did the color of his congested expression of surprise seem at all realistic.

 

 

Contrary to Oliver’s old promise, nothing had been arranged. Sohaila waited in vain for the trustees of Mather Capital to get in touch with her. For over a month, Stan made furtive, sometimes enraged, phone calls to his investigator. He couldn’t afford to restart the investigation. Worse, the glib investigator now seemed unsure of most of the information he’d given Stan the first time around. He’d merely talked to trust companies and investment firms in Philadelphia but had never discovered a solid connection to Oliver, the one Stan remembered so clearly. Stan began to suspect the sleuth had scammed him. He couldn’t find any papers referencing the discovery of Mather Capital. Ali was called. He dug out his charity’s records. The checks he’d thought had come from Mather Capital had come from an ordinary Capital One bank account, and in the space for notes was the scrawl Mather or, just as likely, Mother.

The three of them walking around made the floorboards squeak and chitter. This was the first time they’d returned to the Cedar Street apartment. Like a crime scene, the rooms remained exactly as they had been the day of Oliver’s initial heart attack. But paper towels, cans of tuna in the kitchen, the mineral-stained coffee cup on the counter were all drained of personal significance. Some light-fingered neighbor or EMT may have taken the hunk of red glass and the beading tray. They were nowhere to be seen. A number of yellow and blue plastic bits, the broken tabs from medical somethings, had been dropped here and there. The EMTs had tackled Oliver’s heart attack first. The chemical burns were slow to develop, so the medics hadn’t registered how severe they were for quite a while. Nevertheless, the floor was also strewn with crumpled pieces of gauze, fresh and soiled, some of which had been used to dress the worst of Oliver’s excruciating burns.

He suffered two more attacks later in the hospital, where he lingered for a month, mostly in blessed unconsciousness as the doctors struggled to treat his heart and the second degree burns covering his body, to say nothing of toxic levels of methyl mercury from his all-tuna diet. Oliver’s mercury levels were so high it was suspected he’d been swallowing doses of straight mercury from his Santería vials.

An explosive pop pop pop pop pop came from the kitchen, followed by the noise of something falling. A sudden ugly brightness poured through the kitchen door. Stan had succeeded in tearing the black cloth from the window frames and that had also caused the shades to collapse.

Sohaila touched her neck in alarm, but a shout from Stan calmed her. She walked over to the kitchen and peered in. She produced a whimpering sound of disgust and pity at the state of the kitchen in sunlight. She’d been making the identical sound, a nervous repetition, ever since they’d entered the place.

The smell of bleach had volatilized completely. The sickly sweet Oliver scent had returned. It seemed strange that such a stagnant, intimate odor could fill the whole loft space. Stan strode from the kitchen. “I’m opening the windows,” he announced. He reached behind the shades in the main room and started tugging at the black cloth covering those.

Darius eyed the open suitcase in the main room. The mercury was also gone. Where? It wouldn’t have evaporated or been consumed by insects or dribbled through cracks in the floorboards. No trace of it remained. Strange. He continued his exploratory stroll.

In the bathroom, under the sink, a white hand towel and a washcloth sat in dried swirls like cowpats. The terrycloth ridges had turned a sickly yellow, which made them look like they’d been there for years. Spiral notebook wires and paper fragments, fewer than Darius remembered, had been swept aside into a corner. Had he done it himself that day?

Kneeling by the black tub, he got his first whiff of bleach. In such a weak concentration that it smelled like cleanness. On the stained bottom of the tub sat a heap of paper pulp, thoroughly dried like the towels. Darius picked away at the mass. The pile was dry to its very center. Certain folds of this papier maché were starting to yellow like the terrycloth and to exactly the same hue. No print or handwriting or images remained, not even faint traces of the photos from the glossy travel brochures.

“What was that crazy person yelling at us when we came in?” Stan called.

Darius heard his mother’s keening whimper from the far end of the apartment. Her heels tock-tock-tock-tocked across the floor in his direction. Stan’s footsteps made a soft cree-cree-cree.

“He was just being a clown,” Darius answered Stan loudly. “He wanted money.”

“Did you find anything?” Sohaila asked her son from the bathroom doorway. Darius shook his head. No.

“Yes, but what was it he said?” Stan insisted. He was by the kitchen again. The whole loft was now lighted, pathetic in color, all the windows stripped of black cloth. “It was something funny. I’ll give him a dollar on our way out if he’s still there.”

Darius called from the bathroom, “He said, I was born with no sense of smell, no tonsils, and no tailbone.”

“Right!” Stan started laughing.

“Stop yelling, both of you,” Sohaila hissed.

Stan, who couldn’t hear her, called, “That’s so peculiar a thing to say. It’s probably true. He was probably a friend of Oliver’s. Maybe his banker.”

They’d tried to come at a time when the neighborhood would be deserted, a Sunday. But they had to cross the street to avoid a homeless man dancing by himself. He stopped dancing, bowed his head and side-eyed them as he shuffled along the opposite sidewalk. He wore a showy pout of resentment, as if to demonstrate how their rejection crushed him. From across the street he then yelled in a seemingly happy shift of mood, “I was born with no sense of smell, no tonsils and no tailbone!”

Coming out of the bathroom Darius answered Stan in a normal tone of voice so as not to annoy Sohaila. “That’s a lot of odd stuff to be born without. But you’re right, it doesn’t really sound like, poor me, I was born with no hands, give me money! Maybe it’s true.”

“Yes, it was his true autobiography,” Stan agreed.

“I don’t see anything.” Sohaila came over to join them. “I don’t want anything here.” Her voice was a touch thick with emotion, which she expelled in another whimper. She clapped symbolic dust from her hands.

Her emotion made Darius notice his own lack of any. He wasn’t displeased. If anything, he was happy that he might be turning into an untouchable monster. Like the sharks of his childish imagination, whose only lovable quality was their perfection and the fact they couldn’t be harmed by anything.

“Could there be any secret hiding places here?” Stan wondered.

“Stan!” Sohaila chided him for the fantasy.

Looking around him Darius shrugged, meaning he thought it would be hopeless to search a place like this for anything hidden. Aloud he said, “I’m not sure I would ever tell people about the intimate me. Like my tailbone or my nose. Why would they need to know? Even if it was for money.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

 



 

 

DAVID MCCONNELL is the author of American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men (Akashic, 2013), which won the 2014 American Library Association Award for Non-Fiction. His other novels include The Firebrat (Attagirl, 2003), The Silver Hearted (Alyson, 2010). His short fiction and journalism have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Granta and Between Men. He lives in New York City.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BOOKS BY ITNA

 

 

Urban Gothic: The Complete Stories

Bruce Benderson

 

Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

Tom Cardamone

 

Settlers Landing

Travis Jeppesen

 

Bruno’s Conversion

Tsipi Keller

 

The Virtuous Ones

Christopher Stoddard

 

After David

Catherine Texier